What this blog is about

Here’s the bare bones of what this blog is about. It starts with my grandfather – who knows where it will end up?

My grandfather, George Patrick Robertson, was born in Meadowbank Cottage, Blairgowrie, Perthshire, Scotland on 15th April 1869. He was the second of the five children born to his parents, James Leslie Robertson and Annie Robertson. They were always known in the family as ‘JL’ and ‘Mrs JL’, and I’ll refer to them as such here.

JL ran a successful draper’s shop in Blairgowrie but felt his children would get a better education if he took his family to the capital, and so they all moved to Edinburgh, where George and his two brothers, Jim and Rab, attended Daniel Stuart’s, one of the great Merchant Company schools in the city.

On leaving school, George started as an apprentice at Bertram’s Engineering Works at Sciennes, Edinburgh.

He eventually got a job running a tea garden near Darjeeling, and set off for India, leaving his fiancée, Allison Robina Robertson (his second cousin) behind in Edinburgh. In 1901, though, on the 30th of May, they married, and she returned with him to India.

She gave birth to 3 children.

The first, Allison Annie Robertson, was born in 1902 and died of diptheria aged about 5.

The second, Vere Patrick Robertson, born January 25th 1908, was my mother. Allison Robina Robertson returned to Edinburgh for the birth, and while she was there she bought a flat at 149 Warrender Park Road, as a place for the family to come home to when George’s spell of duty in India ended. She left her mother and her sister Catherine living there in the interim.

The third child was Margaret Struan Robertson, born in 1909.

On the 18th of January 1915, George was drowned in the Rungeet River in an accident while surveying a bridge he was building. His widow and her two remaining daughters returned to the flat at 149, where they stayed on and off for the rest of their lives.

The flat stayed in the family for 88 years: 5 generations of our family lived there, from my great-grandmother (Allison Henderson Taylor, mother of Allison Robina Robertson, mother of Vere Patrick Robertson, who was my mother) down to Christopher John Scott, my son.